The 47th samurai

“Oh, god,” said Bob, “I don’t believe this.”

“Mom is so excited!” said Nikki. “She’s out buying a child’s bed and toys and the whole shebang.”

“Okay, sweetie,” said Bob, holding his child closer, “it’s time to go home.”

Acknowledgments

Readers of the entire Swagger saga will see that the account of Earl’s heroics on Iwo Jima, even as to date and unit, have evolved slightly from previous accounts. As I have progressed through what has become a life’s work, I keep encountering small areas where the joinery between volumes is untidy, and I can only plunge ahead, correcting or reinterpreting as I go. I count on your goodwill to understand that such awkwardnesses are unavoidable and make a promise that if I can ever convince a publisher to negotiate the complicated rights (among the issues: a trilogy in which each volume was issued by a different publisher!) and put the whole thing together in a uniform set, I’ll try and reconcile all such a

I must also say that the great Musashi, oft-quoted here, said many provocative things about the art of the sword, but “Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel” was not one of them. It was Hunter who said that, sitting in his third-floor office in Baltimore, Maryland.

This is another way of pointing out that no reader should impute to me any deep knowledge of the way of the sword. I’m a writer, not a samurai; I tell stories, I don’t cut enemies down. My weapon of choice is the adjective, not the katana. I based my accounts of sword encounters mainly on secondary sources, a slew of texts, and dozens of DVDs of samurai films, high and low. I took sword-cut terminology from Shinkeudo: Japanese Swordsmanship by Toshishiro Obata. Devotees will possibly be upset that I’ve mixed kendo and combat terms in my quest to give the encounters a different feel; send angry e-mails to Hunter-doesn’[email protected] /* */

I relied on friends for support and encouragement. My old pal Le

Bob Beers continues to maintain the unofficial Stephen Hunter website, there being no official one. What he gets out of it, I’ll never know, certainly nothing from me, but he’s made it into something solid. Check it out at Stephenhunter.net. Thanks again, Bob. Alan Doelp, as always, was an invaluable advisor on computer issues.

In the world of the Washington Post four colleagues gave of themselves to my advantage. The great Kunio Francis Tanabe, retired after forty years on Book World, advised me on Japanese names and gave the manuscript a close reading. He also wrote Hideki Yano’s death poem, after pointing out that my version wouldn’t pass muster in Japan. Anthony Faiola, the Post’s brilliant Tokyo correspondent, looked into and then briefed me on the structure of the porno business and its various governing bodies in today’s Japan. Finally, Tomoeh Murikami Tse took the trouble to render an early version of the death poem into kanji. Paul Richard plied me with Japanese art books. I’m greatly indebted to all of them.

Finally, late in the process when news of the book’s publication had somehow reached the Internet, I received an e-mail from Mark Schreiber, a freelance writer, translator, and all-around man-about-town who has lived in Tokyo since 1965. Among his many accomplishments, he is the organizing genius behind the Tabloid Tokyo books, which compile some of the zanier tales of the Tokyo weeklies for American readers. Mark volunteered to read the manuscript for accuracy in all those little areas through which Hunter sometimes dozes, and there were times when it seemed to me he was working harder than I was. One weekend he went to Kabukicho on a scouting trip, found the ideal spot for Kondo Isami to test his blade, measured it, photographed it, mapped it, then e-mailed it to me. That same weekend, I drank, watched football on TV, slept, and of course drank. Moreover, he caught dozens of mistakes of the sort that would have deeply a

I should mention my professional colleagues as well, all of whom were enthusiastic and supportive throughout: Michael Korda and David Rosenthal of Simon & Schuster, and my agent, Esther Newberg, of ICM.

Let me broadly thank the Japanese themselves for being so damned interesting. I must make special mention of my three muses, Sakura Sakarada, Yui Seto, and Shiho. The dedication page expresses my profound gratitude to the artists of the theory and practice of samurai on the screen. I should say, also, that in a certain way those movies saved my mind. The origin of this book, for anyone interested, was a personal depression in my life as a professional film critic, when American movies seemed to have reached a new low. In this morass of mediocrity, I saw Yoji Yamada’s great Twilight Samurai and was instantly reborn. That set me off on a two-year samurai movie rampage (interrupted by American Gunfight) and the obsession took its final form in the idea of writing a samurai novel set in the era of warring clans. Being smart enough to realize that a novel set then by a gaijin who’d seen too many movies wasn’t the soundest of ideas-what would you call it, Memoirs of a Samurai?-so I tried to figure out a way to fuse samurai issues and fighting styles with a traditional American thriller. The result you hold in your hand.

Finally, I must thank my wife, Jean Marbella, the world’s greatest trouper. She’s lived patiently for a year among swords, samurai movies, books on sword fighting, sword making, sword polishing, and sword collecting, all in piles spread randomly throughout the house and seldom policed. Never complained, never whined, and even pretended to be interested in sword fighting and yakuza. What a gal.